Activity Two: From Words to the Drawing Board
Narnia is a world of imaginative scenery, creatures, and magical happenings. C.S. Lewis does an excellent job of describing the characters, their emotions and the setting in exquisite detail.
Film adaptation is the process of transforming a written work like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe into a feature film. Once the book becomes a script, all of the people working on the set of the movie can go about making decisions such as how the characters will look and how the scenery will appear, keeping in mind that they want to appeal to a commercial audience. Important jobs on a movie set include the costume designers, set designers, and make-up artists who use information from the text to make the characters come to life. Try your hand at some design work by choosing from the detailed book excerpts to create a drawing or collage that depicts the character or scene. Remember the importance of detail in making beloved literary characters and scenery come to life!
Example of a book excerpt:
The White Witch
The reindeer were about the size of Shetland ponies and their hair was so white that even the snow hardly looked white compared with them; their branching horns were gilded and shone like something on fire when the sunrise caught them. Their harness was of scarlet leather and covered with bells. On the sledge, driving the reindeer, sat a fat dwarf who whould have been about three feet high ifhe had been standing. He was dressed in a polar bear’s fur and on his head he wore a red hood with a long gold tassel hanging from its point; his huge beard covered his knees and served him instead of a rug. But behind him, on a much higher seat in the middle of the sledge sat a very different person – a great lady, taller than any woman Edmund had ever seen. She was also covered in white fur up to her throat and held a long straight goden wand in her right had and wore a golden crown on her head. Her face was white – not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern.
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, pg. 32
Activity Two: From Words to the Drawing Board
Use the space below to create your drawing or collage!